Resentment building toward FOO - TRIGGERS, lots of them

I've been and posted on this board for some time, but set up a new profile for this post.

I'm not sure what advice I am asking you to give; I just need to get this out and I know I can't be the only one who has felt this way. I've never told anyone, not my spouse, my family, or any counselor, any time.

Background:

I experienced things as a child that I would now, as a parent, label as sexual abuse. I didn't label them as such growing up, because I felt so much shame and guilt (in part due to a conservative religious upbringing.) Before knowing anything about intimacy, I was left with a family member, who in turn left me with a babysitter. I do not know how old I was, who the sitter was, and have very little memory of it. I think I was probably around 4. The sitter gave me a bath, took off her own clothing, and said we were going to have sex. She got in with me, laid on top of me and moved around in a non-penetrative way. I remember the sitter being not much older than a child herself - possibly a young teen?

From that point on, I knew I was a "bad girl." This was reinforced through my faith-based upbringing that was heavily rooted in shame and repentance. Having experienced sexual play, I in turn would seek it out in other children my age. I have distinct memories of sexual play on numerous occasions with other little girls up through 5th grade, and less directly through middle school.

My father kept a continuous stream of pornography in the home. He would hide it, but it was never really hidden in a way that a curious child would not come across it. My first knowledge of real sex and the graphics associated with it came from sexual magazines. This was all during my elementary school years, so maybe ages 4-10. He would occasionally move them, which made me know that he KNEW I was being exposed to it. I felt filthy. And there was no such thing as innocence going forward. Aside from that, I found the pictures themselves very frightening.

I was never molested by a family member. That will become relevant later, when I get around to addressing FOO and the reasons behind this post.

At the age of 16, I went on a trip with all of my family out of the country. My mother and I were the only ones who went to a certain restaurant one night. She became intoxicated (rare in our religion at the time) and left me there with someone who worked in the restaurant. He almost raped me in a storage closet. Again, I was trying to be too "polite" to turn down his advances until it became obvious that I was going to lose my virginity if I didn't stop him. There was slight penetration, but I stopped him at the very last minute. My family had been allowing me to drink, so I was intoxicated myself. This was the first time I had alcohol in my life, and my family left me unsupervised with strangers who were twice my age. There was also a molestation with a sunday school in there somewhere. The years kind of run together.

As kids will do, once I started, I kept doing it. This led to a rapid spiral in my lifestyle and behavior, that later led to drugs, promiscuity, and worse.

With the benfit and maturity of hindsight, I know that it was this early, inappropriate sexualization that created a fear-shame-seeking cycle in my life. In high school, after the incident in the storage closet, when boys my own age began making advances, I felt too "guilty" to say no. I felt like I owed them compliance, and (this sounds unbelievable to me now) I felt like I was too "polite" to stop them. I have had over 40 sexual partners prior to my marriage and several affairs afterwards (prior to becoming a mother.) My husband doesn't know any of this, only because he has never ever asked about my physical past. His family is very uptight, repressed, privlidged, and sheltering. I am sure he wanted to know before we ever got married and didn't want to ask. The affairs afterwards are the thing I am most ashamed of in my entire life. They were instigated by a miscarriage, but that is another post. I take responsibility for all of it, but have left that grief where it belongs and moved forward.

This all leads me to now, when I am the mother of an almost 4 year old daughter. Becoming a mother was the most poignant, affirming, and life-changing thing I could have been blessed with. I am not at all the mother I thought I would be (that is, a failure.) We don't drink and spend every waking minute we can with our daughter outside of work. Raising her is the one thing I am most proud of; we give it everything we have. We completely exhaust ourselves on giving her a safe childhood.

I am realizing, in parenting her well, how much I was failed by my own FOO. I see this tiny, vulnerable person and realize it is MY LIFE'S WORK to keep her whole. Now, I look at my family - who left pornography in the reach of a young child, left me with strangers who assaulted me, gave me alcohol and left me with men alone, to this day call me a "problem child" and "awful teenager" - and this rage is building up. As a parent myself, I see that they had so much complicity in the entire thing.

Now, I hear them make off-hand comments about how I should just wait until my 4-year old is a teenager so she can pay me back for everything I put them through. Having not told anyone about the abuse (or even recognized it AS abuse until recently, if you can believe that), I sometimes want to scream - YOU LET IT ALL HAPPEN.

Most importantly, because of my own experiences, I am absolutely petrified of helping protect her innocence. I've read the statistics on early sexual contact and I know I am not alone in having to grow up so quickly. Far more have gone through much, much worse. I am almost paralyzed now with what is becoming an almost obsessive-compulsive need to protect my daughter. I can't leave her with sitters. I get nauseated and anxious anytime my brothers or father hold her. Men in general make me anxious around her. Even my DH makes me nervous, and you'll have to simply take my word that he. would. never. A male started working at her preschool and I almost pulled her out of the school. The thought of someday letting her go away to camps, have slumber parties, participate in sports with coaches, etc, almost makes me vomit.

I am so conflicted about my feelings toward FOO. They love and are attached to my daughter. I was never directly abused by them. Obviously, we don't leave her alone with them, but I also can't let myself leave her overnight with anyone for that matter.

Does anyone have advice or a similar story to share?

I want to not project my own history on her and would love to give society at large the benefit of the doubt. However, everytime we are around FOO someone makes a comment about what a bad teenager I was, the rage builds up again.

I've been and posted on this board for some time, but set up a new profile for this post.

I'm not sure what advice I am asking you to give; I just need to get this out and I know I can't be the only one who has felt this way. I've never told anyone, not my spouse, my family, or any counselor, any time.

Background:

I experienced things as a child that I would now, as a parent, label as sexual abuse. I didn't label them as such growing up, because I felt so much shame and guilt (in part due to a conservative religious upbringing.) Before knowing anything about intimacy, I was left with a family member, who in turn left me with a babysitter. I do not know how old I was, who the sitter was, and have very little memory of it. I think I was probably around 4. The sitter gave me a bath, took off her own clothing, and said we were going to have sex. She got in with me, laid on top of me and moved around in a non-penetrative way. I remember the sitter being not much older than a child herself - possibly a young teen?

From that point on, I knew I was a "bad girl." This was reinforced through my faith-based upbringing that was heavily rooted in shame and repentance. Having experienced sexual play, I in turn would seek it out in other children my age. I have distinct memories of sexual play on numerous occasions with other little girls up through 5th grade, and less directly through middle school.

My father kept a continuous stream of pornography in the home. He would hide it, but it was never really hidden in a way that a curious child would not come across it. My first knowledge of real sex and the graphics associated with it came from sexual magazines. This was all during my elementary school years, so maybe ages 4-10. He would occasionally move them, which made me know that he KNEW I was being exposed to it. I felt filthy. And there was no such thing as innocence going forward. Aside from that, I found the pictures themselves very frightening.

I was never molested by a family member. That will become relevant later, when I get around to addressing FOO and the reasons behind this post.

At the age of 16, I went on a trip with all of my family out of the country. My mother and I were the only ones who went to a certain restaurant one night. She became intoxicated (rare in our religion at the time) and left me there with someone who worked in the restaurant. He almost raped me in a storage closet. Again, I was trying to be too "polite" to turn down his advances until it became obvious that I was going to lose my virginity if I didn't stop him. There was slight penetration, but I stopped him at the very last minute. My family had been allowing me to drink, so I was intoxicated myself. This was the first time I had alcohol in my life, and my family left me unsupervised with strangers who were twice my age. There was also a molestation with a sunday school in there somewhere. The years kind of run together.

As kids will do, once I started, I kept doing it. This led to a rapid spiral in my lifestyle and behavior, that later led to drugs, promiscuity, and worse.

With the benfit and maturity of hindsight, I know that it was this early, inappropriate sexualization that created a fear-shame-seeking cycle in my life. In high school, after the incident in the storage closet, when boys my own age began making advances, I felt too "guilty" to say no. I felt like I owed them compliance, and (this sounds unbelievable to me now) I felt like I was too "polite" to stop them. I have had over 40 sexual partners prior to my marriage and several affairs afterwards (prior to becoming a mother.) My husband doesn't know any of this, only because he has never ever asked about my physical past. His family is very uptight, repressed, privlidged, and sheltering. I am sure he wanted to know before we ever got married and didn't want to ask. The affairs afterwards are the thing I am most ashamed of in my entire life. They were instigated by a miscarriage, but that is another post. I take responsibility for all of it, but have left that grief where it belongs and moved forward.

This all leads me to now, when I am the mother of an almost 4 year old daughter. Becoming a mother was the most poignant, affirming, and life-changing thing I could have been blessed with. I am not at all the mother I thought I would be (that is, a failure.) We don't drink and spend every waking minute we can with our daughter outside of work. Raising her is the one thing I am most proud of; we give it everything we have. We completely exhaust ourselves on giving her a safe childhood.

I am realizing, in parenting her well, how much I was failed by my own FOO. I see this tiny, vulnerable person and realize it is MY LIFE'S WORK to keep her whole. Now, I look at my family - who left pornography in the reach of a young child, left me with strangers who assaulted me, gave me alcohol and left me with men alone, to this day call me a "problem child" and "awful teenager" - and this rage is building up. As a parent myself, I see that they had so much complicity in the entire thing.

Now, I hear them make off-hand comments about how I should just wait until my 4-year old is a teenager so she can pay me back for everything I put them through. Having not told anyone about the abuse (or even recognized it AS abuse until recently, if you can believe that), I sometimes want to scream - YOU LET IT ALL HAPPEN.

Most importantly, because of my own experiences, I am absolutely petrified of helping protect her innocence. I've read the statistics on early sexual contact and I know I am not alone in having to grow up so quickly. Far more have gone through much, much worse. I am almost paralyzed now with what is becoming an almost obsessive-compulsive need to protect my daughter. I can't leave her with sitters. I get nauseated and anxious anytime my brothers or father hold her. Men in general make me anxious around her. Even my DH makes me nervous, and you'll have to simply take my word that he. would. never. A male started working at her preschool and I almost pulled her out of the school. The thought of someday letting her go away to camps, have slumber parties, participate in sports with coaches, etc, almost makes me vomit.

I am so conflicted about my feelings toward FOO. They love and are attached to my daughter. I was never directly abused by them. Obviously, we don't leave her alone with them, but I also can't let myself leave her overnight with anyone for that matter.

Does anyone have advice or a similar story to share?

I want to not project my own history on her and would love to give society at large the benefit of the doubt. However, everytime we are around FOO someone makes a comment about what a bad teenager I was, the rage builds up again.

i am very sorry for what happened to you. i also agree you need therapy to help you sort yourself out. you may find that it leads you to CO your FOO and that may be the best thing for you, so you can take back a feeling of control over your life.

i was not molested, however i was a "difficult" teenager (weren't we all?) and i don't remember my parents ever trying to give me the benefit of the doubt and HELP me. i was never given counseling or kindness. i was screamed at for being lazy and useless.

i look back on that now as a soon-to-be-parent and i think it should have been on my FOO, just like it should have been on your FOO, to have seen the behavior for what it was - acting out and needing help. even without knowing WHY they knew WHAT you were doing and they should have helped. they didn't.

What a terrible, terrible burden you have had to bear! Honestly, this is an issue that is too serious to just be dealt with here. You need to get counseling to work though the trauma of your past and upbringing and help you to get perspective on parenting your daughter.

Distancing yourself from your FOO right now, would probably be a good thing until you can get some help processing everything you have been through. You are not overreacting by trying to protect your daughter from the people who failed to protect you. That is just common sense. But a CO for your family is not going to help you deal with rest of the emotions and fear you have for your daughter. Please seek counseling for this!

I am sorry you were not protected by your family. But you NEED to get into therapy to work on these specific issues. You cannot keep her away from men or strangers, and if you continue this way it likely will backfire once she becomes a teenager. I'm so sorry that you have and are suffering but your child WILL be affected if you don't deal with this now.

Get therapy for yourself. A private therapist is not going to judge you for the sexual acting out you did or the affairs. They will help you cope with your unreasonable fears, which are a kind of PTSD (in my opinion) compounded with projection.

In addition you have an understandable but scary lack of trust in your relationship with your husband. You are keeping some big secrets from him--and I'm not advocating that you stop keeping them secret just pointing out that there are repercussions for that secrecy. In hiding your history of sexual and emotional abuse you are preventing him from being able to reassure you or help you get over your own trauma. You are still feeling guilty about using and being used by others.

Of course you want to protect your daughter from harm but in each of the circs you describe your family was more than merely unlucky--they were actively negligent or even malicious. You need therapeutic help to pilot your child through to full command over her own sexuality. Your reaction to your own trauma and issues is potentially as problematic for her as your parents boozing and bingeing teetotalism and their hyper puritanical porn fixation.

You need counseling, both to help resolve your own issues with your background and to help you move forward in raising your child. Being raised by an overbearing, irrationally fearful mother can be emotionally stunting for a child.

I cannot tell you the friends I had in high school whose parents were so overprotective and suspicious of everyone who acted out. Every single one of them cut her education off early to jump into marriage just to get out of their house and away from their families.

I am so sorry for all you have been through, and it's terrible that a child should have to endure such trauma. But you have to get counseling. Really. Non-faith based counseling might be best.

The very best protection any of our daughters can have is enough self esteem to stand up for themselves and create their own boundaries - you were not given that, you may need help and support to give that to your daughter. I'm sure you are doing a great job of protecting her now, but your real challenge is to give her the tools to protect herself for her entire life